Weird Soreness After Sprints

I ran 10 100 yard sprints yesterday with 1 minute of rest between each yesterday and I feel soreness today obviously (I was collapsing after the last two sprints). Funny thing was, not only did my legs and glutes kill, but my ribs and abs felt awfully torn up as well. Can somebody explain this to me?

Sprinting involves moving the legs and swinging the arms simultaneously. This creates alot of torque and your abdominal wall has to stabilize your torso.

It’s kind of like the “dead bug” series of exercises that involves laying on your back rotating your torso and kicking your legs.

I felt the same thing a couple weeks ago when I got back into sprinting. As mentioned above, it has a lot to do with the stabilisation your core is made to go through, but I found that after the first session, the soreness tended to go away.

I guess it’s just a different movement pattern for your body, but it’ll catch up soon enough.
Cheers

What everybody else said, plus the fact that you are compressing and expanding your lungs as fast as you can as hard as you can.

You may have also not learned yet how not to tense every muscle in your body when sprinting.

Gotta love that feeling of new sorenesses. Especially when realizing we just got a “free” core workout.

My upper abs are sore today, for instance, because I hadn’t done pull-ups in a while.

I love that soreness.

Like the others said, sprinting requires a solid core. Your transferring your power from your legs up to arms which are pumping hard.

You must understand how many muscles you use when sprinting. You think that this is only a lower body exercise? Consider that your back needs to be strong to offset the torque produced by your legs.

You also tapped into some motor units you never used before, or havent used in a long time. Make no mistake, I applaud you for delving into the world of sprinting. But you have taken on an animal that humbles many. Continue with it.

Ah…now it all makes perfect sense. Though it really kicked my ass, I really haven’t had that kind of satisfaction from a cardio workout in I don’t know how long. Gotta love the soreness!

The soreness you feel is probably related to you almost collapsing. Other respiratory muscles try to help get the oxygen to your lungs when you are excausted.

What everyone else said is true your body is using everything it can to help you breathe and you were probably breathing very hard for a very long (relative) time. But I might mention, ten 100 yard sprints is not a good idea for interval training. As a general rule, when you are doing track work, you need less rest with longer distance because you are heading toward using your oxidative system the longer you run and thus you require less rest.

Doing 100meter sprints with 1 minute rest is like doing ten 4 rm deadlifts with 1 min rest, high density, high effort, very low quality.

what would you suggest then sir? Longer rest periods maybe?

I would suggest longer rest periods yes. 4 minutes maybe 5. Try some 200’s as well, most people with some work can keep up a pretty good sprint at that distance as well, take 4 minute rest and repeat. Much better.

Making the sprints longer would probably help. The shorter the sprint, the harder it is on the body. I wouldn’t necessarily taker greater rests inbetween each sprint, but maybe breaking it up into 2 sets, with a 5 minute break inbetween that could work.

Also, being on a college track and field team, I know from experience that stretching is the most important thing when it comes to preparing for running, especially sprints, so stretching for 10-15 minutes before and after running could help.

Okay, so how does this sound, I do cardio on tuesdays and thursdays, and every third cardio day is a sprint day. How about if I did 10x100 with 4-5 minutes between on the first sprint day, 5x200 yard sprints with 4-5 minutes the next sprint day and then the last sprint day 3x400 yards with 6-7 minutes rest. Does that seem like a better plan?